Another awful story of civil asset forfeiture abuse comes to us via German Lopez at Vox. But at least this one has a happy ending. The beginning, however, is anything but happy. Musician Phil Parhamovich made the mistake of driving in Wyoming without his seatbelt buckled. A click-it ticket in Wyoming usually runs about $25. In Parhamovich's case, it cost him nearly $92,000.

The developer of the World Trade Center in New York has reached a $95.2 million settlement of all claims against American Airlines Group Inc, United Continental Holdings Inc and other aviation defendants stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which involved the carriers’ hijacked planes.

For many years, major U.S. institutions ranging from the Pentagon to the 9/11 Commission have been pushing the line that Iran secretly cooperated with Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. But the evidence for those claims remained either secret or sketchy, and always highly questionable.

In early November, however, the mainstream media claimed to have its “smoking gun”—a CIA document written by an unidentified Al Qaeda official and released in conjunction with 47,000 never-before-seen documents seized from Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This piece of codswallop, dutifully regurgitated by the corporate presstitutes, and configured to make it look like it was something it wasn't is typical of the collusion between the American Deep State, and its presstitutes.

What was happening here, was the creation of a narrative to further and agenda, i.e., that Iran colluded with Al Qaeda, is therefore bad and must be invaded and regime changed.

Very fortunately, it exploded, metaphorically, in their, and the government's collective faces, like a bad trick, cigar.

But don't expect, for a millisecond, that the government and corporate media will stop attempting to lie this country into another war, this time against Iran, which may well mean a war against Russia, whose politicians and military leadership have sworn to defend it, should it be attacked militarily.

It is often hard to tell how close popular movements are to success or whether they are even a threat to the status quo power structure. Despite vigorous protests, it is common to worry whether or not movements are having an impact. One tell-tale sign is when government and big business interests take action to stop or silence a movement.

These days, there is a lot of push back against resistance movements in the United States. While it may be riskier for us when they fight back, it is a positive sign and means that the movement needs to escalate, build power and increase its pressure.

One absurd example of suppression came from Los Angeles where police are enforcing an ordinance that makes it a crime to speak longer than your allotted time when testifying before the city council. When someone goes 20 seconds more than the time they are allowed, police arrest the citizen.

Escalating Punishment for Protesters

This week, the trial of nearly 200 people arrested at the inauguration of Donald Trump began. Each person going to trial is facing 60 years in prison. Their collective sentence, if convicted, would total 12,000 years.>>>

A Department of Homeland Security official admitted that the agency was able to remotely hack into a Boeing 757 during a test in 2016.
The DHS official indicated that he and his team were able to do so without having any direct contact with the aircraft or using any materials that would be flagged by security.
While the exact details of the hack are confidential, Boeing insists that the hackers were not able to take control of the aircraft's flight systems.

Sworn testimony from a former FBI investigator claims the 9/11 Commission lied to the American public regarding the relationship between the hijackers and Saudi Arabia.

The question over exactly what role the Saudi Kingdom played in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 is once again a hot topic. The Saudi Kingdom has long been suspected of financing the 9/11 hijackers. A fourteen-year-old lawsuit brought forth by the “9/11 Families and Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism” seeks to hold the Saudi Kingdom accountable for the attacks. Meanwhile, the Saudi government continues to deny any involvement and calls for the lawsuit’s dismissal...

The cost of America’s global war on terror has yet to be reckoned with, and there’s a very good reason for that. By and large, the US has not been paying for all of these wars, but rather has been borrowing to pay for the conflict.

In the long run that’s going to be expensive. Paying off the war is going to mean not only paying the prices of the conflict but the massive interest accrued in borrowing the cost of those wars.

A new report suggests that just the interest on all that debt will, over the course of decades of servicing it, cost an estimated $8 trillion. So far, they say, the US has paid $534 billion in overseas contingency operations interest.

And that’s just the debt already accrued. America’s assorted wars show no sign of ending, and indeed the Pentagon has been pretty clear about the US deployment in Iraq being a permanent thing.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is why you have to understand that all wars are bankers' wars, because they are SO PROFITABLE for financial institutions.

Among those caught in the unprecedented arrests this week of top princes, wealthy businessmen and senior officials was the scion of one of Saudi Arabia’s most recognizable families: Bakr Binladin, the chairman of the kingdom’s pre-eminent contractor — and Osama bin Laden’s half-brother.

It was a stunning end to a decades-old alliance between the ruling Al Saud and Binladin families that saw the Saudi Binladin Group secure a near-monopoly on mega-expansion projects in Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, throughout the reigns of successive Saudi monarchs.

Largely unreported and unknown to almost everyone is the recent push to re-establish an Iranian role in the 9/11 attacks. To be more specific, some in Washington are currently trying to allege that Iran played a larger role in the 9/11 attacks than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Why this assertion about Iran— that has been lying fallow for years—is so recently being resurrected raises questions, bears scrutiny, and begs an examination.

Largely unreported and unknown to almost everyone is the recent push to re-establish an Iranian role in the 9/11 attacks. To be more specific, some in Washington are currently trying to allege that Iran played a larger role in the 9/11 attacks than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Why this assertion about Iran— that has been lying fallow for years—is so recently being resurrected raises questions, bears scrutiny, and begs an examination.

Konstantin P. Petrov (August 23, 1945, Noginsk, Moscow Region - July 21, 2009, Moscow) - Soviet and Russian military leader, a Russian social and political activist. Candidate of Technical Sciences. Member of International Informatization Academy. Major-General. Prematurely discharged from the Armed Forces in November 1995. Chairman of the Presidium of the Central Council of the political party "Course of Truth and Unity." Head of the department at the Udmurt State University.

A stunning new study authored by a former US government intelligence analyst and staff member for official investigations into the 9/11 attacks, concludes that the Islamic State (ISIS) received significant state-sponsorship up to 2016. The study is corroborated by revelations from two former senior British intelligence officials in exclusive interviews with INSURGE.

Rowley, a former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. She just appeared on The Real News report “Special Counsel Investigating Trump Campaign Has Deep Ties to the Deep State,” about Mueller being appointed to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

While Mueller has been widely described as being of impeccable character by much of official Washington, Rowley said today: “The truth is that Robert Mueller (and James Comey as deputy attorney general — see my New York Times op-ed on day of Comey’s confirmation hearing) presided over a cover-up …”

The USS Cole case judge Wednesday found the Marine general in charge of war court defense teams guilty of contempt for refusing to follow the judge’s orders and sentenced him to 21 days confinement and to pay a $1,000 fine.

Air Force Col. Vance Spath also declared “null and void” a decision by Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, 50, to release three civilian defense attorneys from the capital terror case. The lawyers resigned last month over a covert breach of attorney-client privilege involving something so secretive at the terror prison that the public cannot know.

Wednesday evening, with Baker confined to his quarters in a trailer park behind the courthouse, Judge Spath issued another order: Directing the three lawyers — Rick Kammen, Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears — to litigate Friday in the death-penalty case against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri remotely from the Washington D.C., area by video feed to Guantánamo.

Webmaster's Commentary:

All of which leads me to the speculation; was this guy, perchance, a patsy, to be crucified legally, then executed for something he absolutely did not do?!?

This very brazen show of force by Judge Spath against Baker does not speak very highly of the judicial process going on here, and that Spath wants to see his "orders" followed through to a lightning-quick death penalty conviction of al Nashiri, before some new evidence might be presented, which could possibly unravel the case to the point of no return, just makes me wonder.

I haven’t had food in my stomach for 23 days. The 20 September was the day they told us they would no longer feed us. They have decided to leave us to waste away and die instead.

I am in so much pain every minute that I know it can’t go on much longer. Now as each night comes, I wonder if I will wake up in the morning. When will my organs fail? When will my heart stop? I am slowly slipping away and no one notices.

There is a man who is in charge of all the medical staff. I don’t know his name but they call him the senior medical officer. He was the one who called us all in and told us they would stop feeding us. As soon as he took over I knew he was bad news and now he has decided to end our lives.

I don’t have many days left.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So this... no trial, no medical treatment, no compassion, and utterly, no rule of law- is what "justice" looks like at Gitmo.

I am appalled and sickened by this, and if the US government and military continue with this treatment of prisoners of war, President Trump just might as well remove the US as a signator to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

...Or does he even know the US government ever signed it?!? At this point, I wouldn't bet against that!!

Disturbing news from Guantánamo, via the human rights organization Reprieve. Yesterday, in a press release, Reprieve explained that the authorities at Guantánamo have stopped force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners, a practice that has existed for ten years, because of a new Trump administration policy.”

Hunger strikers have existed at Guantánamo almost since the prison opened, and in 2013 a prison-wide hunger strike drew worldwide condemnation for President Obama’s inaction in moving towards closing the prison, as he had promised on his second day in office. Inconvenienced by Republican lawmakers, who had raised considerable obstacles to the release of prisoners, Obama had chosen not to challenge the Republicans, and had, instead, done nothing. The hunger strike changed all that, but towards the end of 2013, after the release of prisoners resumed, the authorities at Guantánamo stopped reporting the numbers of men who were on a hunger strike.

Webmaster's Commentary:

These are not "Unlawful Combatants", as the Bush regime characterized these men; they are prisoners of war, and as such, should be afforded all the rights and priveleges afforded by the Geneva Conventions, to which, I believe, the US government is still (allegedly) a signator.

They should be either tried for their alleged crimes, or released to a country willing to take them in; it is just that simple.

But what the US military must be terrified about, once these men die from the consequences of their self-induced starvation, are their autopsies getting out, which will most likely demonstarate that for some of them, water boarding was not the only torture they endured.

After 9/11, the United States government preyed on the fear felt by many Americans to justify the passage of the USA Patriot Act—a law that was supposed to prevent future terrorist attacks. Now, after the Las Vegas shooting, the government has another proposed law ready to go, and just as with the Patriot Act, it also infringes on Americans’ liberties, and does very little for their security.

The impacts of the planes had little effect on the buildings. Both of the Twin Towers withstood the impacts and showed no sign of failure in response. WTC7 was not hit by a plane, but it was the building with the most precipitous collapse.

It is incorrect to say the fires in the buildings melted the steel beams or caused them to fail. Most of the jet fuel (kerosene) burned in large fire balls outside of the buildings. What remained behind would have burned off within a few minutes. The fires that continued were fed by ordinary office furnishings.

Below are excerpts from Pentagon eyewitness accounts. The highlighted accounts include a link to a page which contains an unsolicited phone call from Jeffrey Hill to the eyewitness in which he asks what they saw on 9/11. These people do not talk about hypotheticals based on the size of the hole in the Pentagon or the lack of aircraft debris, they relate what they saw on 9/11.

Listen to what they have to say, and take note of how racked off some of them are about cooked up hypothetical scenarios.

On 27 November 2009 PilotsFor911Truth.org published a simple fact about the flight of Flight 77 which makes a conventional hijacking scenario impossible - according to Flight Data provided by the NTSB the Flight Deck Door was never opened in flight. The status of the door was polled every 5 seconds from 12:18:05 GMT to 13:37:09 GMT, and each poll logged the door as closed.

No-one entered the cockpit of the plane during the flight, therefore it was not flown into the Pentagon by an Arab hijacker.

Only in Warner Brothers cartoons does the Coyote leave a cookie-cutter outline of himself as he crashes into the rock face. In the real world (someplace that the "pod people" need to spend more time in) collisions are more complex. Airplanes do not make clean outline holes in buildings they collide with any more than cars make clean outline holes in walls they collide with. The Pentagon, built mostly of wood and concrete, and in that one section having been recently reinforced, is a heavy and solid object. Jet aircraft, designed to be able to fly, are very thin and lightweight. They are, if you think about it, mostly filled with air, like an aluminum balloon. They are not designed to penetrate other objects or to remain intact while doing so.

"Then I picked [the plane] up as it struck very low into the Pentagon. The wings folded back and it was like watching someone slam an empty aluminum can into a wall. The jet folded up like an accordion." [Mike Walter - eyewitness]

The government and media have misled us about 9/11 in order to compel public opinion to support the War on Terror.

Why have we gone along with this ugly deception? 30 million Muslims have been murdered since 9/11. When will Americans have enough retribution? Do we accept endless war as normal? Are we numb to the suffering caused by our military interventions?

No. We have simply been propagandized into submission. We have been deceived into thinking that the War on Terror is a good thing, a valiant struggle against terrorists who intend to attack us as we were on 9/11.

Hate to agree with Karl,but wars are economic,actually criminal. Somebody wants what someone else has and they figure the best way to get it is to steal it,using various nebulous reasons to motivate the cannon fodder. Like religion,nationalism,race or my favorite from Gullivers Travels;"They open their eggs from the wrong end!"

(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday backed having companies from the United States develop Afghanistan’s reserves of rare earth minerals, despite formidable obstacles to industrial mining in the country.

The comments, at a meeting in New York, were the latest in a series in which both U.S. officials and the Afghan government have emphasized the potential strategic value of Afghanistan’s vast and largely untapped mineral reserves.

What we really need for 9/11 truth is to open the files of the CIA, NSA and FBI, and we need it for truth in many other realms too. The Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have a petition that seeks a new and truly independent investigation. This is a step in the right direction. We need far more than that. We need to penetrate the secrecy of the CIA and NSA on a timely and complete basis, not 50 years after the fact and only partially. Their files have to be opened. We cannot let the government continue to hide behind “national security”.

As we run up to yet another anniversary of the 9-11 false-flag attacks, the government's controlled assets on the web are once again pushing the "no plane at the Pentagon" hoax as hard as they can, to give the corporate media an easy means to discredit those who question the official story while avoiding the really tough questions like, "Why did the BBC announce the collapse of World Trade Center 7 twenty six minutes before it actually happened?" Or, "How did President Bush's Secret Service know he was not a target sitting in that school on Florida?"
The media cannot ask, let alone answer, those questions, so the propagandists gin up this "No plane" theory and plant it online to give the corporate media an easy handle with which to ridicule and dismiss the whole idea of doubting the official story of 9-11.

Christine Todd Whitman, who as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks told the public the air around Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe, has admitted for the first time she was wrong.

Lesson number 1: Never trust the government. Ever. And especially when it has anything to do with terrorism, foreign policy, war, or the military. The government is a giant lie-making machine. Never trust what the government says about the events leading up to 9/11, the causes of the 9/11 attacks, or what actually happened on 9/11.

When it comes to 9/11, there are two groups of people: those who don’t know exactly what happened, and those who orchestrated it.

Nearly everyone on earth belongs in the former category, but a lot of folks like to pretend they have a rock solid understanding of the events which transpired on that fateful day in 2001. Scoffing mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.

The cliché is true: September 11, 2001, represents a defining American moment. Generation X and Millennials suddenly had their own day of infamy, just as their parents and grandparents had Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 marked the end of a relatively untroubled time in the US following the 1980 and 90s, and the beginning of a dark turn that continues to this day. Optimism, an enduring feature of the American psyche (rightly or wrongly identified as buncombe by Mencken) suddenly was in short supply.

President Trump can start to push back against the Deep State. The is rescind and Declassify PDD-51. The People need to know what is in these documents sign by President Bush that makes him a dictator and congress a ceremonial body with no authority.

16 years later, the War on Terror™ has yielded hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Americans, Iraqis, and Afghans, ongoing and intractable wars disguised as nation building, the Patriot Act, illegal executive actions, trillions in new federal debt, vastly increased federal surveillance powers, rubber stamped FISA court warrants, TSA at the airports, a useless Department of Homeland Security, overflowing VA hospitals, and increasingly militarized police here at home. More importantly, it has yielded a distressing complacency toward grotesque federal power. -- It has not yielded peace, or liberty, or security. But liberty vs. security was never the choice.

President Trump has become the third president over the course of 16 consecutive years to extend the “temporary state of national emergency” which was imposed in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The state of emergency gives the president considerable leeway to bypass legal limits surrounding the military and the use of the National Guard and reserve troops. Exactly how much this power is used is itself unclear, as presidents have for years ignored a legal requirement to offer reports to Congress every six months on the matter.

Officially, Presidents Bush, Obama, and now Trump have defended the extension on the grounds that terrorism still exists and is a thing. Legally speaking, however, the emergency declaration was intended to give the president flexibility until Congress had time to act after 9/11.

Webmaster's Commentary:

It was painfully predictable, from a President who steadfastly believes that "war is good for business", and that perpetual war is the only way for the Occupied Unhinged Serveilled States of Amerika can maintain its financial hegemony.

On the 16th anniversary of 9/11, a prescient Hunter S. Thompson column from the day after the attacks was shared on social media. Thompson wrote at ESPN on Sept. 12, 2001:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

>>>

(*If nothing else we get a clearer understanding of the suiciding of Thompson)

It has been 16 years since the devastating attacks of September 11. Coverage of the tragedy during which nearly 3,000 perished was the main priority that day for most Western news agencies (the scenes were witnessed by an estimated two billion people - a third of the human race). Together with amateur records, this has produced such an incredible amount of footage, some of it is rarely seen even today.

Bored Panda has collected some of the least seen 9/11 pictures from across the internet. From street-shots of the towers going down to satellite images of New York City, these unforgettable photos reveal new angles of the horrific day that changed the world for ever.

Nearly 18 months after the attacks, he began to question the official story when he read about significant purchases of put options, prior to 9/11, on companies directly affected by the attacks. These large financial wagers, placed on the world's stock and option's markets, implied that sophisticated investors profited from foreknowledge of the attacks. This initiated years of research regarding details of the attacks and how the public record is replete with credible facts that contradict many of the lies and omissions codified in the 9/11 Commission Report and sold to the American public by the mainstream media.

While I remained at my headquarters unit in Virginia, my friend embarked on multiple tours of duty within a short two years as a Marine infantryman. I remember even then being surprised and unsettled by how rapidly his overseas deployments came. He was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq on his third deployment overseas prior to his twenty-first birthday. He had selflessly tried to stop a car laden with explosives as it sped into his checkpoint, possibly preventing more deaths among the nearby group of Marines wounded in the attack.

Paul Wolfowitz, considered one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, attended my friend’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. More recently, Wolfowitz spent last year's anniversary of the 9/11 attack on NBC’s Meet the Press shamelessly arguing that he and the Bush administration had done nothing wrong in selling the war and were honest with the American people.

They say 9-11 changed everything. Although the U.S. Government has, from the very beginning, done everything within its power to stifle and quarantine free speech, the Bush era really kicked the practice into high gear. It’s been nearly fifteen years ago that I first heard the phrase “Free Speech Zone”. At the time, I co-habitated Jackson, Wyoming with Empire’s most successful war criminal and profiteer, Vice President Dick Cheney. The wet dream of worldwide military domination he shared with his criminal organization known as The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), was about to get a giant kick start and grow to fruition with the impending, made for television, Shock and Awe of The Iraq War; the sequel to the spectacular World Trade Center/Pentagon production of 9-11-2001.

Some UK teachers are too frightened — too frightened — to discuss 9/11 with their students because they fear a backlash from Muslim students and parents, says a counter-extremism education expert.

The UK Telegraph reports that Kamal Hanif, executive principal of Waverley Education Foundation and advisor to the Department for Education on combating counter-extremism in schools, said that some teachers — particularly those with a high proportion of Muslim students — see the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as a risky topic for classroom discussion.

Unless we come to terms with 9/11 and the obvious fact that the official government story is a ridiculous fairytale, it’ll be hard for our nation to move forward in an intelligent, courageous and ethical manner.

Lieutenant Anthony 'Tony' Zeoli spent nine months trying to find traces of people - alive or dead - among the rubble after the attacks on September 11, 2001.

He led the longest-serving volunteer unit on Ground Zero - Team Romeo, a squad staffed by 12 already-retired police officers who put on their uniforms again in a desperate bid to recover the 2,606 missing people ('Romeo' signified 'R' for 'retired').

Exactly 16 years later, he is opening up for the first time about the horrors they experienced, publishing a book called Rising From The Ashes.

But now, he and the surviving members of his unit are all suffering from a new kind of horror: cancers, PTSD, lung diseases, sleep apnea, digestive diseases and - in some cases - death, all as a result of inhaling the toxic cocktail of mercury, jet fuel, asbestos and more.

After Pearl Harbor, were teachers “scared” to teach about Japanese militarism and Nazi atrocities? No, because the UK and US hadn’t let into their countries large numbers of people who sympathized with the enemy, and who authorities thought had to be appeased and accommodated at all costs. The madness that has overtaken us now was nonexistent then.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The difference today is that people can go online and find out for themselves that the official story of 9-11 is a flat-out lie!

US President Donald Trump attends a national moment of silence on the 16th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade center using his 9/11 memorial speech to issue a warning to anyone planning future attacks on the US.

"Just two or three minutes ago, there was yet another collapse or explosion. I'm now out of sight. A good samaritan has taken me in on ___ Street. But at a quarter to 11 there was another collapse or explosion following the 10:30 collapse of the second tower. And a firefighter that rushed by estimated that 50 stories went down. The street filled with smoke. It was like a forest fire roaring down a canyon. Now, as ___ and others have told you, all downtown Manhattan is covered with thick white ash and building material."

Today, on the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 neocon coup d’état, the New York Times editorial page has published a column by economist Paul Krugman calling the official narrative “totally false” – and accusing the Bush-Cheney Administration of “rejoicing” at the successful attack on America.

Sept. 11, 2001, is remembered for a number of reasons, and one of the most important, which often goes unnoticed, is that it was used as an excuse to degrade the liberties of Americans through the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Oct. 26, 2001—just 45 days after 9/11. The act passed in the Senate with a vote of 98-1, and it passed in the House with a vote of 357-66.

Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul was one of the few who voted against the act when he was in the House of Representatives, and he has been speaking out against it ever since. Paul is also known for his presidential campaigns, and when he was seeking the Republican nomination in the 2012 election, he reminded the world of one of the most crucial aspects of the PATRIOT Act.

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